Lily Pads & Artificial Intelligence - Explaining Exponential Growth

"Many of us have been hearing about how artificial intelligence will change our lives for so long that we're getting tired of the hype. 

I know that's how I feel sometimes."

Transcript:

Many of us have been hearing about how artificial intelligence will change our lives for so long that we're getting tired of the hype. 

I know that's how I feel sometimes. 

But let's imagine that we are all living in houses around a giant lake that is completely free of lily pads. 

On June 1, one lily pad appears. This lily pad doubles every day. 

So on day two, we have two lily pads. 

On day three we're going to have for lily pads. 

On day four, we'll have eight lily pads, and so on until on June 30, the lake will be completely full of lily pads. 

Now the first question which is an old math riddle is on what day do you think the lake is half full of lily pads? 

And the answer is day 29. 

Because if the lily pads are doubling every day, and the lake is going to be entirely full of lily pads on day 30, then it must be exactly half full of lily pads on the day before. 

Here's a harder question though. 

What day do you think is the first day that the lake is more than 1%? covered in lily pads?

If you go with your intuition, most people will guess the 10th Or maybe the 15th day, but actually the lake won't be more than 1% cupboard until the 24th day, even though by that time, there will be more than 8 million lily pads. 

How does this relate to artificial intelligence? 

Well, if we are all living around this lake of exponentially multiplying lily pads, most of us won't even notice a single lily pad until past the 25th day, by which time there will be over 16 million lily pads. 

And in just five more days, the lake will be completely covered with over 500 million lily pads. Some technologies can be exponential in their growth and exponential growth is not intuitive to humans. 

I am suggesting then in regard to artificial intelligence. 

We might be at an inflection point that is something like day 24 or 25 on our lake. 

We might be seeing a lot of change in the coming years and it might be coming fast.